If It Could be Wished Away
by AllShallFade777
Summary: S10/11 AU. It wasn't supposed to end like this. Getting rid of the Mark was supposed to make things better, but everything just kept getting worse. And now Sam had lost Dean anyway. This couldn't be happening; this couldn't be real. And maybe it wasn't. The memory of glowing blue eyes, strange patterns swirling on a hand that reached for his forehead...Rated T just to be safe.


If It Could be Wished Away

 _The blast of a gunshot. A white-hot spear of pain shattering his leg. These were the last things Sam was aware of before everything went black. In that split second before the darkness of his slipping consciousness caught up with his falling body, he realized something:_

 _He didn't care._

 _He didn't care about the British chick standing in the bunker claiming to be from another Men of Letters chapter. He didn't care that she'd just shot him in the leg. He didn't care that he could bleed out and die right there on the floor of the first real home he'd ever known._

 _He just didn't care. He was too tired of everything—the fear. The loss. The weight of the world constantly on his shoulders. He'd faced it his whole life, but this time he knew Dean wouldn't be coming to save him, to pick up the pieces, to put him back together again so they could keep on facing it together._

 _Dean wouldn't be coming back at all._

 _The last echo of thought before the void of unconsciousness swallowed him was the small comfort that, if Sam died, maybe Dean would be waiting for him._

 _And whether or not it reached his lips, Sam didn't care._

 _He smiled._

Someone was shaking him.

"Sam? Sammy? Dammit, Sam, c'mon."

He knew that voice. God, he knew that voice.

"Can you hear me? C'mon, man, wake up."

He wanted to. It was all he wanted, but the memories, dreams, visions—they wouldn't let him go.

 _Blood spilling into a bowl in front of an iron safe. Charlie Bradbury, dead, burning. Dean, holding a scythe—_ close your eyes, Sammy _. A hurricane of black clouds in an empty field. The Impala, dented, damaged, carrying them home. Red eyes glaring in the dark. A gun firing, blood welling under shaking hands. White light blazing in the palm of Dean's hand. Cherry blossoms tumbling over a tombstone_.

Through the whirlwind of images, he heard,"Hang on, Sammy. Okay, just hang on, I gotcha."

The sound of glass was high and light even as the memory of gunfire pounded deep and heavy in his head.

"One more. One more. You'll be okay. You're okay."

A needle pierced his skin—a sharp sting in his arm—and all at once the chaos in his head shattered.

Sam's eyes flew open.

Everything was blurry. Shapes and shades swam in his vision. Nothing made sense.

But…

…There was a face. Right in front of his, and completely out of focus.

He recognized it anyway.

Dean— _Dean—_ was hovering over him.

"Sammy? Hey, man, you with me? Sam?"

Dean was shaking him, and he finally felt it—not just the distant nagging, rocking at his consciousness, but the hand on his shoulder, the gripping fingers, the fabric of his shirt rubbing his skin with the movement. He blinked and dragged in a breath. He suddenly realized: he was alive, awake, and maybe he'd been breathing before, but that was when Dean was dead, and now he was here and it was like Sam hadn't breathed right up until now. His vision cleared, filtering out everything that wasn't Dean.

Dean was pale and sweaty, a bleeding scratch running along his cheek. He was breathing hard, and his eyes were dark with worry. But he was here.

 _Dean was here. Dean was alive._

Sam didn't know how it happened, but the next thing he knew, he was clinging to Dean, his arms trembling fiercely but refusing to let go.

"Whoa! Dude," Dean exclaimed. He put his hands on Sam's shoulders, and for a moment it seemed he was going to push him away. Then Dean's arms wrapped around him, warm and steadying and strong. "It's okay, man," he said softly. "It's okay. I gotcha, Sammy."

Sam shook his head against Dean's shoulder. He couldn't find the words to respond. He realized he was crying. He didn't care. Dean was alive.

He could've fallen asleep in his brother's arms. He hadn't done that in over twenty years; so long he could barely remember the last time. So much had happened since they were both just two kids crammed in a motel room, trying to hold each other together while trying not to kill each other, waiting for their dad to come home.

Since then, they'd been through more than a lifetime.

He may not have fallen asleep in Dean's arms, but he may have lost consciousness again there, because he couldn't remember when Dean pulled out of the embrace. Sam was suddenly being held at arm's length, blinking dumbly as Dean looked him up and down.

"Jeez, Sam," Dean was muttering. His mouth was set in a hard line as he gently prodded a bloody tear in Sam's sleeve. "That sonofabitch is lucky he's already dead."

Sam blinked hard to wake himself up, then squinted. 'He?' What 'he' was Dean talking about? As far as he knew, all their current enemies were female. The Darkness, British lady…unless he was talking about Lucifer?

With a start, Sam sat up and peered around. His eyes darted over the dank, shadowy interior of the main floor of a warehouse. Watery gray light filtered through filthy windows. A closet-sized, grid-iron cage butted up against the wall behind them, ropes woven into the roof of it and dangling down ominously. The rest of the warehouse was empty but for the occasional, twisted hulk of old machinery and a strange, wet-looking heap of clothes a few feet away.

He sighed, relieved. No Lucifer.

But where was that British lady? And Cas? And what had happened with Amara?

His chest tightened, and his head started spinning. What the hell was going on?

"What…what happened?" he croaked. "How did you—how did you come back? How are you here? How are you even _alive?_ " His hand fisted in Dean's shirt.

Dean frowned, searching Sam's face. "What are you talking about?" he said. "Why wouldn't I be alive?"

Sam's brow scrunched. He was already losing his grip on the conversation. "The Darkness, you, the souls, the end of the world. You stopped it. The sun... And that British lady said…"

The memory of a gunshot rang in his ears, and his hand flew to his leg in search of the bullet wound. It was gone.

"Sammy…"

Sam looked up, bewildered to the point of feeling his senses fading out again, and was surprised by the guilt on Dean's face. Dean grimaced, squeezing Sam's shoulder. "None of that was real," he said.

Sam stared at him. "What?"

"Everything you've been seeing," Dean said grimly. "Whatever you've been seeing. None of it happened."

Distantly, Sam felt himself listing to the side. Dean grabbed him to keep him upright, and Sam forced himself to stay with it. He swallowed hard. "H…how?"

"It was a djinn." Dean's eyes flicked to the side. Sam forced down his panic to follow his brother's gaze to the pile of wet clothing. Except now that he was really looking at it, he realized it wasn't a pile of wet clothing. It was a pile of _bloody_ clothing. Beneath all the mangled red, a flap of blue-tattooed skin peeked through.

 _That_ was a djinn? The thing was barely recognizable.

Only then did he notice the Mark of Cain still burned into Dean's forearm.

"It had you for almost a week," Dean said, swallowing. "It's my fault. That dinner run you went on—I fell asleep before you got back. Didn't realize till morning that you never did come back. Then there was this run-in with the cops, and I had to cover my tracks or end up getting arrested. I'm so sorry, Sammy."

A week.

But he'd just spent the last several _months_ trying to save the world. The Darkness, God, Lucifer. None of it…none of it was real?

Sam looked at his brother, dazed. "Sorry?"

"You've been stuck in dream-world for an entire week while that thing fed on you. All because I couldn't keep my damn eyes open." Misery was written in every line in Dean's face.

Sam was reeling. Grief, relief, disbelief—it all roiled in his gut, in his head, all of it too much, too fast for him to process. The world he'd just left…it had really never happened?

But that wasn't Dean's fault—he'd just saved Sam from that living nightmare, saved his life for the umpteenth time, for Chuck's sake (or apparently, maybe, hopefully not Chuck?). It was going to take a while to sort through everything, but one thing he knew for certain was that Dean had nothing to blame himself for.

Dean was still talking. "You weren't responding to the antidote," he said, nodding at the empty syringes lying beside them. "I had to give you a double dose just to get you half-conscious. Wherever the freak had you, you were in deep. I thought I was too late." He shrugged helplessly.

"No," Sam whispered hoarsely. The last thing he remembered flashed back: Dean supposedly dead, Cas banished, himself getting shot, and he cleared his throat, speaking strongly for the first time. "No, actually, you got here just in time."

Dean's eyes flashed to his, brows knitted in question. Sam just shook his head and let his chin drop to his chest. His eyes fell closed. He was too exhausted to go into the details now.

The comforting squeeze to his shoulder told him that Dean got it. Then he was being helped—hauled—to his feet.

"C'mon, let's get out of here," Dean grunted. He let Sam lean against him as Sam tried to get his legs to cooperate. His numb muscles screamed with stiffness and threatened to give out. The blood rushed out of his head, and his vision and hearing muffled out. On the brink of unconsciousness, Dean's voice pulled him back once again.

"—make me carry your sasquatch ass all the way to the car, man. C'mon. One foot in front of the other. That's it."

Sam did his best. Maybe it was the headrush, or an aftereffect of the djinn poison, or something to do with the double shot of antidote, but as he stumbled along, his mind floating as his body struggled to keep up with his brother, he suddenly he couldn't get the image of that one scene from the old holiday classic, " _Santa Claus is Coming to Town,"_ out of his head.

 _Put one foot in front of the other, and soon you'll be walking 'cross the floor. Put one foot in front of the other…_

"Dude, shut up," Dean grumbled, pulling him along.

"I didn't say anything," Sam protested. He hadn't, right? He was pretty sure he hadn't.

"Winter Warlock, am I right?" Dean raised an eyebrow at him. When Sam didn't say anything, he snorted and shook his head. "I've been your Jiminy Cricket before Sam, but I sure as hell ain't gonna be your Kris Kringle now."

"I didn't say anything!" Sam insisted. A smile tugged through his exhausted grimace. He could barely keep his own thoughts straight right now, but didn't it just figure that Dean could read them anyway?

It was disorienting going from beating the Darkness back to dealing with the Mark; Sam was struggling to place exactly when this was on the curing-the-Mark-timeline, but if he and Dean were still on the same wavelength, Dean couldn't be too far gone, right?

They staggered past what remained of the djinn, and Sam got a good look at the bloody heap of rent flesh and pulverized bone. A silver blade still stuck out of what remained of the creature's face.

The swell of warmth towards his brother evaporated, and he shivered.

By the time they reached the car, Sam was more out of it than in. He was dragging his feet, barely able to keep his head up. Dean dumped him into his usual seat and told him to get some sleep, and Sam gladly complied, blacking out before Dean even got in the car.

No dreams disturbed him. He woke what felt like hours later to find the windows dark and streaked with rain. The car was quiet, the windshield wipers flicking methodically and the tires humming over the wet road.

His whole body felt like jelly still managed to ache like he'd just gone several rounds with a poltergeist as he slowly sat up. His head throbbed, and his tongue was like a piece of carpet glued to the bottom of his mouth.

Dean, little more than a shadow in the driver's seat, looked over at him when he stirred. "Hey, how you feeling?" he asked.

"Aces," Sam rasped. He started coughing.

Dean kept one hand on the wheel as he rooted around in the back. He came up with a water bottle. "Here."

Sam took it and drank the whole thing.

"You want another?" Dean asked, but Sam was already leaning back to get it himself. He drank half of it before putting the cap back on and dropping it on the seat.

"Better?" Dean said.

"Yeah." He started to rub his wrists, which were sore from where he'd been tied up and suspended, but immediately stopped when they proved too raw to touch. "Where are we?" he asked.

"Couple hours from the bunker," Dean answered, glancing at him again. "You gonna need a motel sooner than that?"

"No. No, I'm good."

Dean gave a short nod. "Would've stopped earlier, but we couldn't stay in town with the cops on my tail. You were already out anyway, so…"

"Right."

They rode on in silence for a few minutes. Sam watched the rain-slicked highway slide towards them, the headlights picking out the empty fields rolling by on either side of the road. The ghost of another night played in his mind—his dad in the driver's seat, "Someday Soon" on the radio. _God helps those who help themselves._

He closed his eyes. No. That had never happened. It was just the memory of a vision within a dream.

How messed up were their lives that that even made sense?

"So," Dean said suddenly. Sam looked at him. "What was your wish?"

"What?"

"You know, your wish. What the djinn showed you. It was that kind of djinn, right?"

"My insides aren't liquefied, and I wasn't stuck in a horror-movie acid trip, so I'd say so."

"Then what did you wish for? Eight-foot tall doors, endless salad bar—"

"You think my deepest wishes are taller doors and salad?" Sam scoffed.

Dean shrugged. "When you put it like that, it kind of makes you sound like a giraffe, so…yeah."

Sam snorted and shook his head.

"Then what _did_ you wish for?" Dean pressed.

Sam glanced out the window, trying to think of an answer that wouldn't dredge up all the fake crap he'd just lived, or the real crap they were both living now. He sighed through his nose, knowing Dean probably already knew what the wish was anyway, so what was the point in skating around it? He fixed his gaze on a spot on the empty seat between them. "I wished," he started hoarsely, then cleared his throat. "I wished I'd found a way to get rid of the Mark."

"Ah." Dean didn't say anything for a minute. Then, "Did it work?"

Sam looked at him. "Well, yeah, Dean. It's what I wished for."

"Yeah, but I mean…is it feasible? Whatever you did, do you think we could actually do it? Get the Mark off?" His voice was struggling to be neutral, but Sam could hear the hope in it.

"No," he said. "Not that way. It…it cost way too much."

Dean's shoulders stiffened. "Oh."

With a flash of guilt, Sam realized what he must be thinking. Cost wasn't supposed to matter to them, not when it came to saving each other. He rushed to clarify. "People we love, Dean. They suffered, died, horribly." An image of Charlie, lying bloody in a motel bathtub, filled his mind, and he felt like throwing up. He shook his head to get rid of it. "It put the whole world in jeopardy, and in the end it didn't even matter that I'd saved you from the Mark. In the end you…I…I lost you anyway, Dean."

Dean's expression was hidden in the dark, but Sam saw him nod stiffly.

"We'll find another way," Sam said fervently.

"Damn straight," Dean grunted. His tone softened when he added, "I know we will, Sammy." After a moment, he snorted. "Stupid to think a djinn-poison fever-dream would give us an actual fix, anyway."

Sam huffed. He could easily remember a time when his dreams had had a nasty habit of coming true, and the sense of foreboding he got thinking about this one struck him in a way that made it hard to dismiss, but Dean was right. There was no way the answer to their problems lay in a monster-induced delusion.

Thinking back on some of the details of his dream-world, though, he couldn't stop a snort of laughter. "Trust me," he said. "Even if that _was_ a possibility, you would not like what comes after. I mean, all the crap that happened…it was impossible, even for us."

"Oh yeah? Like what?" Dean asked, interested.

"Like…God had a sister."

He could feel Dean's incredulous look through the dark. "God. Had a sister."

"Yeah. That you were apparently in love with. Oh, and Chuck was God."

"Chuck. Chuck Shurley, 'I make money off your misery,' Chuck? And I was in love with his sister." Dean shuddered. "Excuse me while I vomit."

Sam shrugged. "She was good-looking at least. Not your usual type, though. Also, you killed Death."

"Dude, that's badass."

Sam snorted. "Yeah, I was too busy watching the next apocalypse start to appreciate the coolness at the time."

"Another apocalypse, huh? Of all that crap, that's the only thing I'd believe." Dean shook his head, sighing, and echoed Sam's earlier thoughts. "Man, our lives are so screwed up."

"Yeah. You're telling me."

But a screwed up life with his brother was still infinitely better than a normal one without him.

Despite everything, the mood in the car had lightened, and they spent the rest of the ride home in companionable silence.

* * *

 **This was meant to be the prologue to something-basically an excuse for certain things to be a certain way-but I didn't like how it influenced the rest of the story, so I cut it and made it its own little thing. Honestly, it was not meant to be a 'I hate how things really happened, so here's my fix-it version' story. If season 11 could be wished away, I wouldn't. I liked season 11. Play 'Night Moves' for me and I get all nostalgic X)**

 **Season 12, on the other hand...do NOT get me started.**

 **Anyway, thanks for reading!**


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